denim on denim

torn

keyboard tetris

a lock of his true love's hair

teach me how to dougie

Just a couple thangs.

When I was home for Thanksgiving, my childhood best friend Ashley made me walk on train tracks in six-inch heels while she took photos of it. They are here.

I didn't write about it (not really), but at the beginning of November I went to a taping of Inside The Actor's Studio with James Franco. It was so amazing and inspiring. A few weeks later, author/fave writer Stephen Elliott wrote about Franco in his Daily Rumpus e-mail. Franco optioned The Adderall Diaries and plans to direct/star in a film version of the memoir. I wrote Stephen back and told him about the taping, and he asked me to edit my notes into an article. So I did. Then it was linked to by USA Today. So that was a good day.

Because good things usually come in threes: I have watched this like ten times. I think it says something.

daylight savings account

I know we've only won an hour,
But it feels like twenty, more,
Plenty.
The time fairy
Has dropped it off in the night,
Deposited it in a bag made of dreams.

How many hours I've spent
Pondering your eyes behind glass -
They remind me of childhood,
Like how the yellow bumps
Of a New York subway platform
Press into my soles,
Resurrecting an era of baths
In a stranger's house.

unipulse

Seeing a girl snort coke out of her purse at the LCD show made me wonder

How much art is made

To keep the drugged masses at bay

We are a drugged culture. We live in a culture of alcohol. It's considered normal. I've seen more people lose themselves in an alcoholic oblivion than I care to count. I like nights like tonight when I get high off music, thumping bass pulsing under my toes and through my veins and into my brain. Synapses firing and starting up again, refusing the trespass of fatigue. I don't feel tired when I dance. I felt like I could go on all night, except my feet hurt. But I could just remove my shoes and keep going. When music moves me, it makes me move. A bass drop is a vitamin B12 injection directly into my eyelids. I forget who I am, where I am, who I'm not, where I'm not. I am just alive. I am just bouncing. I don't feel happy, or not feel happy. I don't feel, I just am.

a stroll in dumbo

I am obsessed with the rain because I can’t hear it anymore.
I am obsessed with the clouds because I don't see them anymore.
I am obsessed with my childhood because it won't have me anymore.
I am obsessed with my childhood because I’m trying to reclaim it.
I am obsessed with myself because it’s all I’ve got and know I'll have forever.

I am obsessed with the universe because it is the only immeasurable thing.
I am obsessed with the female orgasm because it is the only immeasurable thing.

I am obsessed with you because you give me hope in the dark.
I am enthralled by you because you don’t like to think of what you do to me.
And I am in love with you because only the thought of you turns me inside out.

Only that.

southern hem, northern haw

what i feel when i'm playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like i don't owe nobody nothing and it's just a test just to see how far i can relax into the cold wave of a note. when everything hits just right (just and right) the note of nobility can go on forever. i never tire of the solitary E and i trust my guitar and i don't care about anything. sometimes i feel like i've broken through and i'm free and i could dig into eternity into eternity riding the wave and realm of the E. sometimes it's useless. here i am struggling and filled with dread—afraid that i'll never squeeze enough graphite from my damaged cranium to inspire or asphyxiate any eyes grazing like hungry cows across the stage or page. inside of me i'm crazy i'm just crazy. inside i must continue. i see her, my stiff muse, jutting around round round round like a broken speeding statue. the colonial year is dead and the greeks too are finished. the face of alexander remains not only solely due to sculpture but through the power and foresight and magnetism of alexander himself. the artist must maintain his swagger. he must he must he must be intoxicated by ritual as well as result. look at me i am laughing. i am laughing. i am lapping cocaine from the hard brown palm of the bouncer. and i trust my guitar. therefore we black out together. therefore i would run through scum. and scum is just ahead, ah we see it, but we just laugh. we're ascending through the hollow mountain. we are peeking. we are laughing. we are kneeling. we are laughing. we are radiating at last. this rebellion is just a gas our gas a gas that we pass. 

 

ya bangin on my heart's wammy bar

the vibrations reverb verb verb through my fingers

i get down on my knees

for you

I am peaches in September, and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl

I am a town.

 

Sitting in a bookstore in Dumbo, I see a child walk in.
It smells like ice cream! he exclaims.
I don't smell it, but I'm sure he's right.

I awoke from a dream.
I had been dreaming of Patti and Basquiat.
I awoke with menstrual cramps and hobbled bleary-eyed to the bathroom.
I went in and turned the light on but it blinded me so I shut it back off.
I was still asleep, really, as I felt like I was Patti and Basquiat, or at least belonged to them.
Or perhaps they belonged to me.
And I thought I was giving birth to them.
I thought about Just Kids,
How it was my second mother,
How my natural-born mother birthed me
And how that book birthed me again,
Anew.
For without it I would not exist.
I moaned in pain,
Thinking I was somehow returning the favor.
I thought of Patti hunched over shredding her guitar.
 I thought of how Basquiat died at only 27.
I thought of people with PBR tattoos.
I debated whether or not to take a pain pill.
I turned the light back on so I could see my blood,
Make sure it was the right kind and not the wrong kind.
My eyes cleared at last and I wondered how long I had been in that bathroom.
The sun was up now,
6 AM in Harlem, 
Birds tweeting.
What kind of vision was this?

Weeklong Series: Young Love, Part Four

The following note was written on receipt paper. For a while Jacob worked at a pet store, so I assume that's where this came from. We often wrote each other notes and stuck them under the windshield wipers before or after school so that we would be surprised after school or band practice - this explains why the paper is so damn wrinkled while most of the notes were folded and nicely kept. He signed his name "Jamob" because we went through a stage where we would rearrange the letters in our full names, thus misspelling them on purpose. I would be "Mebham" or something and he would be "Jamob." Sounds so stupid now, but it was endearing at the time.

When I was home I also found the ticket stubs to a lot of the movies we saw together, and they're pretty amazing because some of them are from films I now rank in my favorite films of all time (The Ring, top 50; Vanilla Sky, top 10) - it's just so cool that I still have this shit. It's really interesting to note how cheap a movie used to be: in 2002 in Alabama, it was 7.50 to get into a movie at night, and 5.50 during the day. Last week, I paid $19 to see Toy Story 3 in 3D in NYC at night, and $12 to see it again in Alabama during the afternoon. NINETEEN DOLLARS. Vom.

--

red dress, strappy shoes

i think

she's the saddest girl to ever hold 

a henri bendel bag.

memorial day weekend in photos (and some words and photos of words)

What a joy to look ahead to read into the signs of your future. So much happiness is in store for you that the most brillantly lighted stars will be put to shame by the brightness of your life. Ah, this is not all caused by sheer good luck. Nay, nay my friend, your perseverance, your clever ways of handling your domestic problems and your sincerity in dealing with others are pointing the way to their reward. Some strangers will urge you to get involved in a gambling proposition. Avoid this, and you will be forever grateful. "Oh, happiness, what an elusive thing you are. But thank God you were born beneath its star."

several more things

1. Last week I went to the LCD Soundsystem show at Terminal 5. The following is a video I took on my iPhone of the last part of their closing set. They played "New York, I Love You," obvs, then the chorus from Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind," which I found kitschy but also couldn't help loving, before releasing a hundred white balloons from the ceiling. The concert was amazing - my friend Brady and I were in the general admission standing area and we were surrounded by young people obsessed with themselves and obsessed with just being alive. This video is terrible, because I was jumping around and acting like a damn fool, but I feel that it adequately  represents the entirety of the concert, which consisted of me jumping around and acting like a damn fool. It was fucking infectious.



After the balloons dropped, Brady and I posed with one of them in front of a dumpster, natch.

2. In other news: I bought one of these.

And I am taking piano lessons. I grew up in an extremely musical household - I can trace my entire childhood based on what albums I was listening to with my parents (read: Queen, The Eagles, Chicago, Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, The Doobie Brothers, Journey, Sade, Roberta Flack, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion were all in the repertoire), and I danced my youth away - and once I got bigger I played the flute for seven years. I realized recently that I had lost that outlet, which makes no sense. I miss making music or at least being somehow involved with it. I've always always always wanted to learn how to play the piano, so I'm just diving into it. It requires some budgeting, of course, because this is New York, but it's totally worth it. And the harmonica purchase is an addendum to that. I also intend to learn how to play the guitar this summer. I'm an ambitious lady.

3. Speaking of being a lady, I spent all day Sunday helping my amazing bestie Jenny Anderson with a pin-up photo shoot on the roof of my friend's Brooklyn apartment. I spent the whole day looking around in gape-mouthed awe that I know so many beautiful, strong, talented women. Jenny is a clit tease and has only shown us a couple photos. Here is one of them. The lineup goes something like this: actress, writer, writer, actress, dancer, actress, writer, writer, actress, dancer, and of course, photographer (behind the lens). Kick. Ass. Ladies.

4. Feeling rather ladylike from the shoot, I went the other day to get a mani/pedi, and as I was sitting in the spa waiting to indulge myself, I started reading Willie Morris' memoir North Toward Home. The book chronicles his life, moving from Yazoo City, Mississippi to go to college in Texas before taking on New York City, where he became an accomplished writer and the editor of Harper's Magazine. He grew to be totally disenchanted with the city and ended up moving back to the South - of course, he took root in Oxford, where I went to college - and the book obviously details his relationship with both the South and the North, both his past and his present. Because Zac is moving to New Orleans at the end of the summer, and because I too yearn for the South and ponder daily a return to my roots, it is likely going to be an incredibly important book for me to read.

ANYWAY. As I sat in the window reading, the sun was pouring through the window as it set, framing the words on the glass. I looked down and the shadow it cast was scrawled across my book.

The universe can't really get any more direct than that.

manhattan looks like some place else

I took a group of photos over the past few days, and when I looked back over them they all seemed to look like... somewhere other than New York. Kind of weird.